Edna W. Lawrence Natural History Collection

In the 1920s and ’30s, RISD faculty member Edna W. Lawrence (a 1920 graduate of the Painting program) would spend summers driving across the country collecting natural specimens for students to work with in her Nature Drawing class. In 1937 she founded the Nature Lab with an original collection of 1,286 objects (including shells, butterflies, minerals, skeletons, seed pods and taxidermy) that grew to more than 25,000 items by the time she retired 38 years later. Today the Natural History Collection includes nearly 80,000 individual specimens.